What Time Is It? - Current Time?

Updated on June 9, 2011

I am only going to take a couple of minutes of your valuable time

What time is it & current time - are two of the most popular searches on search engines such as Google. But what is actually time, and why do we have such a fascination with it? In the beginning, there was no time. The universe was just there - timeless. We humans invented ‘time’. It was a way to put our lives in order, but in these modern times, it is actually times that rules us. We are totally obsessed with it and constantly asking ‘what time is it?’. In fact, if we loose track of time, we get into a real panic.

Time wasn’t invented by Mr. Rolex

Time wasn’t invented by Mr. Rolex or Mr. Timex, indeed our need to control things using time goes back a long, long way, past those ancient Romans, Greeks and even those Egyptians to the Palaeolithic era where simple moon calendars based on 12 or 13 lunar months were used. The Egyptians messed around with time and each new Pharaoh started their own calendar. The Romans of course had to mess with their own version of time, Julius Caesar in 45 BC put the Roman empire on a solar calendar. But, we have to thank good old Pope Gregory XIII for the Gregorian calendar introduced in 1582, that most countries use today.

Dividing the Day Up :

Various devices have been used to divide the day up into time segments. These range from sun dials, water clocks and hourglasses to incense sticks and candles were, and still are, commonly used to measure time. These were followed by mechanical,and more recently digital clocks. Now, it’s atomic clocks that keeps us in track with the correct time and are accurate to seconds in many millions of years.

Blame the Railways/Railroads :

Prior to the coming of the railway age, we were really not that concerned with time. Many villages had different times on their church and town hall clocks as the need to be accurate with time was not really that important. Sunrise and sunset were more important to most people. However, with railways came timetables, and the need for everybody to adhere to railway/railroad time to make the system run properly.

Now, we are stuck with railway time and need for accurate time keeping. Our lives are so link to time that it makes us stressed If we cannot keep up with it, and you often hear people say that there is not enough hours in the day.

Traditional 'modern' clock

Sun Dial

Hour glass - whoops wrong sort !

Stonehenge - A stone age time measuring device?

Time is Relative :

While we know there is sixty minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day, yet time is relative. You don’t need to be Einstein to realise this; have you notice that the last hour at work or school goes so slowly as if the clock is going backwards? But time flies when you spend time on your favourite hobby or with your lover. How does that happen when hour is an hour - a set period of time?

Dream Time :

Even more confusing is how dream time is different to time in our waking hours. A dream that seems to go on for hours can only take up a few minutes of sleep time. This proves that our perception of time is incorrect. Our lives are like trains running to a timetable, but nobody has really defined how the time works. I haven’t really got time to take you deeper into this aspect of time!

Time is a Human Invention :

We invented time for living on planet earth based on lunar and solar events. We can take this time into space for our own use, but in space does time exist away from our tiny little blue planet? How do you measure time in space or perhaps time doesn’t exist except in our minds.

End of Time :

Whatever you make of time, it can perhaps be best summed in a famous quote by Ray Cummings, an early writer of science fiction, wrote in 1922, "Time… is what keeps everything from happening at once"

So, What Time is it Now?

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Comments 3 comments

Great quote; and a way for us to mark what we perceive to be forward movement.

avorodisa 5 years ago from Russia

Does time really exist? I'd say, I agree with you that it only exists in our minds. In reality, is there any time or space? Or does time represent changes while in reality the space moves towards us instead of running towards the horizon?

Midnight Oil 4 years ago from Isle of Man UK Author

What time is it & current time - are two of the most popular searches on search engines such as Google. But what is actually time, and why do we have such a fascination with it?